The Battle for Sanskrit

Title: The Battle for Sanskrit – Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred? Oppressive or Liberating? Dead or Alive?
Author: Rajiv Malhotra
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2016 (First)
ISBN: 9789351775386
Pages: 468

Sanskrit has been the language that united India culturally and politically for millennia till the time of Islamic invasions. Though a thousand years of disuse since that episode had sapped some of its vitality in the political arena, Sanskrit continues as a link language for the spiritually minded. During British occupation, the whole genre of Orientalist studies was created to search India’s canons and texts in Sanskrit with a view to tweak the colonial regime to increase its efficiency. The ancient law books had to be translated into English which were then thought to act as the standard on which justice would be dispensed to Indians. However at no point in the growth of Orientalism was it concerned with the eventual replacement of English with Sanskrit. It co-opted some Indians trained in Western methods to translate Sanskrit works to English. With the fall of colonialism, scarcity of resources drove Orientalist research from Oxbridge to American universities, especially Harvard. Several American scholars gained a masterful grasp of Sanskrit and began to study the literature in detail. Most of the present-day Indians don’t know Sanskrit. Hence it fills them with immense pride with some gullibility to see a Westerner handling the ancient language pretty well even though it may be as short as reciting a couplet. Internal defences are lowered as an outcome and the Western scholar is poised to enjoy unlimited power in controlling the flow of patronage and resources from rich Indian businessmen and religious institutions. This book warns about the assault on our Vedic traditions coming from an American school of thought whose fundamental assumptions are dismissive of the sacred dimension of the language. We should not be naïve to hand over the keys to our institutions to outsiders to represent our legacy. The book also seeks to wake up traditional scholars of Sanskrit about an important Western school of Sanskrit studies whose scholars are intervening in modern Indian society with the explicitly stated view of detoxifying it of ‘poisons’ allegedly built into Sanskrit and to dismantle the ‘oppressive’ mindset against Dalits, women and Muslims. Rajiv Malhotra worked as a senior executive in the software and telecom industries before becoming a management consultant. He took early retirement in the 1990s at the age of 44 and established Infinity Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Princeton, New Jersey.

Most of the discussion is based on the work and activities of Sheldon Pollock of Harvard and the group of scholars under his guidance. The author defines two categories of Sanskrit researchers. The Outsiders refer to people from Western academies and the Insiders denote the traditional scholars of the language. He warns that the Outsiders are highly vocal and public in championing their view. At the same time, some of the Insiders are so naïve that they feel flattered when the Outsiders show interest on them which is really intended to dismantle the traditional world view. These Western scholars are accused to have gone too far in prescriptive study rather than descriptive and are more like political activists representing a foreign perspective seeking to topple and demolish Indian sanskriti in its present form. The Outsiders are so powerful that they control many of the important international conferences on Sanskrit, the prestigious chairs of research activity, the best-paid academic jobs and the availability of grants for research work. It is to be specified here that the categorization of Outsiders and Insiders does not in any way infer ethnic or racial divide. It’s only the worldview of the groups that make the difference. Indian scholars who do their research in India but subscribe to the Western precepts also deserve the epithet of ‘Outsiders’.

Malhotra explains how the nucleus of Sanskrit studies was shifted from Britain to the US after the fall of colonialism and the development of a new American Orientalism. This differed in one more aspect with the colonial variety in that it was shaped by the white society’s conflict with indigenous tribes of America at the frontier and African slaves within. This victor-vanquished aspect was later extended to India. It applied the image of the ‘savage’ to those deemed ‘idol worshippers’, ‘primitive’, ‘lacking in morals’ and ‘prone to violence’ etc. It often stereotyped ‘savage’ culture as being oppressive towards its women, children and lower social strata, described as subaltern groups. The modus operandi of this American group is also explained. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Indian Left was stranded without a patron. Just as the CIA recruited the former Soviet nuclear engineers to work for the US, agencies such as the Ford Foundation appropriated them to serve the American academics in the humanities. These scholars quickly learned that a sure path to rapid advancement in the field was to produce research demonstrating that exploitation was built into Indian society. The idea that Western colonialism was a thing of the past is implicit in the term ‘post-colonial’ which they widely circulated. At the same instant, the concept that Sanskrit was still exploiting was given wide currency. Besides, the Indian Left lacked adequate knowledge of Sanskrit. Even eminent historians who interpreted ancient inscriptions such as Romila Thapar or Irfan Habib are ignorant of Sanskrit. This made them vulnerable to ridicule over silly errors in their treatises. This proved a serious handicap for Indian leftists against traditionalists. This gap is now filled by a group of politically charged American Sanskrit scholars with Marxist commitments. This book is, in fact, a battle cry against them.

What is truly shocking in the book is the author’s expose of Sheldon Pollock’s strategies – both overt and covert. Even though he is widely acclaimed as a great Sanskrit scholar, this book argues and proves that Pollock has a clandestine agenda to revamp Sanskrit heritage on the mould of American ‘woke’ values. Pollock criticised scholars who romanticized the Sanskrit tradition. He believes in the ethical responsibility of scholars to expose the oppressiveness he sees within the tradition and to eliminate it by re-engineering the tradition. He rejected the Vedic roots of the heritage terming them primitive, superstitious and discriminatory. Pollock superimposed on to Hinduism the Western divide between Biblical theology/liturgy on the one hand and the performing arts on the other. This was a failure to comprehend the dichotomy of Western art with its established puritanical religion as the former had originated from its ancient paganism. This was not the case in India. He sets out to decouple kavyas from the Vedas as belonging to a secular viewpoint and transcendence respectively. Malhotra asserts this to be totally wrong. A truly outrageous finding of Pollock is that Sanskrit is the source of Nazi evil. He claims that Nazism and British Indology were merely building on the socio-political oppression that had always existed in Sanskrit language. In effect, Pollock argues that Sanskrit is at the root of all evil in the world. Is this the indicator of a scholar’s love for the language he had studied for a lifetime? He then goes on to deny the originality of the ancient composers of Sanskrit. Vedic Brahmins are alleged to have copied the new literary Sanskrit developed by Buddhists and created Ramayana. According to Pollock, Ramayana is plagiarized from a Jataka story. He then claims that Ramayana was used by the Brahmin-Kshatriya aristocracy to arouse Hindus and demonize Muslim invaders from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. In short, even resisting the fanatic Muslim conquerors – who erected towers of skulls of men they killed and took their women and children as sex slaves – is a sin the Indians had committed!

Malhotra successfully peels off the false arguments enveloping Pollock’s idea one by one and eventually reaches the core which is shockingly illogical and fallacious. Pollock refers to karma as a form of fatalism; but equating karma with the Western concept of mechanistic fate is a profound misunderstanding. Karma is the result of prior actions and its future can be altered by new ones. Pollock’s next attempt is to strike at the fault lines of Indian society and cleave it into many pieces. Pollock deconstructs kavya with a singular view to interpret it as an expression of the aestheticization of political power, which is only a ploy to make the power look glamorous to the subjects of the king and to keep them obedient. It was primarily produced in the royal courts by resident royal poets who were complicit in the socio-political stratification and oppression of Dalits and women. Hindu kings used Sanskrit grammar also as a tool of oppression is the next item in the charge sheet. Correct order and structure of language were thought to lead to correct order and structure in society. He brings in this argument in analogy with medieval Europe where laws were imposed on speakers of certain languages with the clear intention to oppress them. This European parable is not at all applicable to India as no Hindu king had banned any language.

A detailed analysis of the duplicitous nature of Pollock’s intellect is given in this book. In fact, he is widely regarded as a friend of India who has dedicated a lifetime of research to Sanskrit studies. The Indian government had conferred on him the prestigious Padma Shri in 2010. He is a close friend of the philanthropic billionaires in India and is the founding editor of the Murty Classical Library of India in the US which was set up with funds from the family of the Infosys co-founder N R Narayana Murty. In fact, the author came into the foreground when the Sringeri Matha established by Adi Shankara was planning to finance a research effort by Pollock and his cronies which would have inflicted damage on the sacred tradition of Sanskrit. The author’s intervention was just in time to put a freeze on that decision. Malhotra alleges that in the mainstream media, Pollock projects great love for Sanskrit to impress traditional Indians and their government. Yet in his academic writings he claims that praising Sanskrit amounts to a ‘farcical repetition of myths of primevality’ (p.275). Pollock’s tirades even challenge the integrity of India. He claims that there was no Indian nation or even Indian civilization. He implored scholars to explore the historical contingencies that made nation-states of France and England but not of Tamil Nadu or Maharashtra (p.311). He seems to be troubled with the state of affairs that India did not disintegrate into multiple nationalities.

The book is excellently structured and brilliantly argued with logical pleas and descriptive examples. However, the author gets a bit carried away while dealing with traditional studies of Sanskrit and its oral tradition. It is claimed that mantras are understood as corresponding to vibrations ‘serving as keys to higher states of consciousness’. Hence writing them down and translating it defeats the whole purpose. This argument does not seem to be much rational. The author calls for new itihasas and smritis to be written in Sanskrit. He suggests the two long-lived traumatic events in the last millennium: the Islamic invasions which peaked with Aurangzeb’s rule and the British colonialism as subject matter of the proposed literary venture. What makes this volume priceless is its extra-sharp analytics of Pollock’s academic corpus. He takes great pains to explain and illustrate the theories of Pollock such as ‘aestheticization of power’ to make it understandable to general readers as well. Roping in the traditionalists to understand and respond to Pollock’s claims is another aim of this illustrative discourse. Criticism against Pollock made by other western scholars such as J. Hanneder is also included. 

Rajiv Malhotra is a true nationalist who is ever on the lookout for movements against the nation. One of his immensely prescient books is ‘Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Fault-lines’ which was reviewed earlier here.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star